Northwest Reel Life April 2024 Volume 3 Issue 6 - Flipbook - Page 24
you a lingcod Zen Master,
The Ling Whisperer!
Once you have figured out
where to fish, now what?
Lingcod fishing can be
either a put-the-rod-in-aholder passive affair or a
highly technical means of
working an artificial bait
along the edge of a reef.
My approach is somewhere
in the middle. Typically, I
actively fish artificial baits
using a less aggressive
drop-and-retrieve method.
More on that later…
Bait or artificials? Both
work and lingcod are
suckers for just about
24 | NWFISHING.net
anything that passes in
front of them. One of the
biggest lings I have ever
caught was a massive
beast that had latched
on to a smaller ling that
had inhaled a homemade
copper pipe jig. That said;
bait can be deadly here in
Puget Sound. Although
herring or squid work
sanddabs are the way to go.
Sanddabs are easy to find,
catch, and work well dead
or alive. A simple way to
keep them mostly alive is to
keep them in a salt brine in
a cooler. A couple of bags of
ice, salt water, and an extra
cup of rock salt. Not always
but it seems that when you
take the sanddabs out of
the brine, they perk up a
bit. It may be a suspended
animation thing, like an old
horror movie “The Attack of
the Killer Sanddabs”…
I like to fish sanddabs on
a 2-6 ounce painted jig
head and fish them like
an artificial bait. They also
fish well on a dropper loop
rig or a hard tie heavier
mooching rig. If fishing
them on the mooching rig,
hook the lead hook through
the mouth, out through
the lower jaw then about
2/3rds of the way down the
sanddab’s body the trailing
